[Foundation-l] More on Wikimedia strategic planning

[Ray Saintonge]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> As the discussions about all these plans is going to be in English, it will
> be very much "others" telling communities how to behave, how to move
> forward. The notion that policies and guidelines are good is offset by
> people who found themselves not or no longer welcome and moved away. As this
> is already true for English language projects, you may appreciate that the
> notion that "the" rules and guidelines are beneficial is just wrong when you
> try to project them on other projects.
>   

That's why the most broadly applicable rules need to be very few and to 
be very broadly flexible.  Anglo-cultural dominance is far more 
insidious than anglophonic dominance.
> When you want to transcend local policies and guidelines, you have to start
> thinking on a more global level. On this level there are big and small
> Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks etc. There are projects that serve a
> global need and are the victim of local constraints like Commons and also
> Meta. We are not organised in a way that gives priority to the more global
> issues and consequently we are very much unaware of issues that the "others"
> face and why our "local" issues can be irrelevant elsewhere. Given this lack
> of awareness there are few low hanging fruits because we forgot to bring the
> bees to the orchard.
When the hive mind becomes too crowded the bees set off to found new 
colonies.  Maybe we should be encouraging more forks.

Ec